In 21-century, our amusements become more various than ever before. People can acquire information of scenic spots around the world or enjoy those pleasured and famous films at home just through a digital video disc (DVD) player. Due to the efforts of the related industries, the techniques escalates into a state of art brings the people in both video and audio enjoyment as he or she are personal on the scene. For satisfying the user's demands, a variety of functions associated with a multimedia playback system are in common. In result, to make the user for operating multimedia playback system well and easily, the instruction menu, however, are miscellaneous rather than simple. Consequently, providing user operation steps as simple as possible become a goal for the related multimedia makers.
An on-screen display (OSD) to provide user an easy operation interface is a main stream. User can select his favorite profiles to operate his desired functions. In general, the screen control display includes a set-up menu and an on screen display. User can set easily his personal profile though monitor.
For purpose of providing user to view those available items which he can select, the icons with a variety of colors are typically used to provide user a good interface. Hence, screen control display usually provides user a set-up menu which is a hierarchical list including a plurality of elements composed of two portions: text and frame. Each element is shown through the color of foreground object, text font body, and color of the background object of the frame. Once one element of the list is selected, it will be highlight either through the color change of foreground or the background color to hint user the element being selected.
Referring to FIG. 1A, it shows three possible states for one element as “Selected”, “Unselected”, and “Disable”, designed respectively, 101, 102, and 103 according to prior art. Obviously, only one of them is displayed on the screen control display at one time for one element, However, it still needs to store totally three graphic objects, each for one state. Hence, they not only occupy the space of the available memory but also become the screen control system resource. In the meantime, if the element is exchanged from one state to another, the state changes will become a heavy burden of the screen control system.
FIG. 1B shows a color mapping table including a plurality of color indexes and their corresponding colors according to the prior art. It shows a table includes fields of color indexes, and a series of palettes having three primary colors: red, blue, and green. The color index is formed by 8 bit binary decimal code (BCD), i.e., 8 bits to form 256 colors for one element color graphic object. Each color index is directed to a palette consisting of three primary colors given for a digital number, respectively. Each primary color is formed of two hex numbers. However, only small portions of them are selected for 256 color indexes. Hereinafter, anything data about coordinate on the screen, column height, row width, text font, and other similar format on the screen will be skipped.
To highlight a selected object, change of the colors of the foreground object and the background object may be more convenient. The color of each pixel for foreground object is exchanged with the background object. The color indexes for foreground and background objects are exchanged. Hence, according to prior art, as shown in FIG. 1B, while an element is updated from an unselected state into a selected state, it still becomes a heaving loading that the color of the foreground object is exchanged to the background object.
Moreover, to express the states of the objects in varying combination of 4 bits to produce 16 colors are usually found to cope with most of the requirements. Thus an object of the present invention is to provide a method for process the color graph objects in the setup menu to effectively decrease amount of data.